With development of wireless network technologies, a new network architecture emerges. To improve throughput of user equipment, the user equipment may transmit data to two or more base stations simultaneously, where data transmitted between the user equipment and the two or more base stations is carried on one or more radio bearers. For the user equipment, among the two or more base stations, there is only one master base station, and the other base stations are secondary base stations, where only the master base station can generate a radio resource control message for configuring the user equipment, a cell group provided by the master base station to serve the user equipment is a master cell group, and a cell group provided by the secondary base station to serve the user equipment is a secondary cell group.
In the new network architecture, the user equipment may communicate with the master base station and the secondary base station by using three types of radio bearers, namely, a radio bearer (which is also referred to as a master cell group radio bearer or a first-type radio bearer) served only by the master cell group of the master base station, a radio bearer (which is also referred to as a secondary cell group radio bearer or a second-type radio bearer) served only by the secondary cell group of the secondary base station, and a radio bearer (which is also referred to as an offload radio bearer or a third-type radio bearer) served by the master cell group of the master base station and the secondary cell group of the secondary base station simultaneously. Meanwhile, the user equipment has multiple MAC (Medium Access Control) entities, where one MAC entity (which may be referred to as a MAC entity corresponding to the master cell group) corresponds to the master cell group, each of the other MAC entities (which may be referred to as a MAC entity corresponding to the secondary cell group) corresponds to one secondary cell group.
However, because in a conventional network architecture, there is only one type of radio bearers, and user equipment has only one MAC entity, a configuration method in the conventional network architecture cannot be used for correctly configuring different types of radio bearers or MAC entities in the new network architecture.